It's That Time of Year

2015 is pretty much over. I hope it was good for everyone; if not, you must not have played the game of the year (GOTY, Goatee, or GoTey). Fallout 4 was released and is probably considered for a bunch of best games lists, Monster Hunter 4 Ultimate is likely still being played to death by its audience, while Pillars of Eternity and Axiom Verge are being picked apart by their rabid fans. There was much fighting to be had here at Why Should We Fight and it was narrowed down to two different games.

First things first, I play a lot of retro games and don't really pay attention to the year a title is released. Good games came out in 1995 and good games came out in 2015. I had to check the dates of a few of the games I liked and was surprised to find out that they were from 2014 or 2013; it didn't seem like they were that old. On with the show...

March gave us Bloodborne. Victorian style horror where you subdue werewolves and other beasts while unraveling the mysteries of a blood drunk city that holds a nightly hunt in the name of the Healing Church. You must seek the Pale Blood and escape the nightmare you have been trapped in. Don't worry it starts Victorian with your character looking like the guys in Brotherhood of the Wolf when they fought in the rain and becomes something much more cosmic. I've been a Souls series fan since Demon's Souls taught me it wasn't safe to bring everyone back to the Nexus but it was the Lovecraftian horror themes are what really kept me around. Read all of the item descriptions, look for the eyes, and get ready to use some of the most creative weapons you've seen in quite some time.

September brought us Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Pain. Metal Gear is another series I have been following for quite some time; it blew my mind in 1998. After an entire console generation where the "open-world" game has reigned supreme (and become kind of stale, c'mon Ubisoft, switch it up) it seems like we actually have something that feels different. The flaws of the open world genre are still there (EVERY soldier in Afghanistan would have been Fulton'd out), but adding it to the Metal Gear formula gives us a game where you can approach a situation the way you want to. I still love coming up on a guard post and shooting a tranq dart into each one of their chests as fast as I can and watching them fall like dominos. I'm kind of happy to see you aren't punished as bad as you used to be for using deadly force because so many of your tools will kill your enemies instead of just stunning them. This game is a real open world toy box.

I was on the fence for a while. Either one of these titles deserves recognition. In November something awesome happened. The Old Hunters. They took Bloodborne and ramped everything up to 11. Ridiculous new weapons that aren't reskins but completely new, more punishing bosses that may make you break your controller, and insight into what made the city of Yharnam full of bloodthirsty hunters who have become worse than what they hunt. This is DLC the way it should be, completely original content that adds to and takes nothing away from the base product. Bravo From Software, bravo.

Game of the Year: Bloodborne.

A Flash Flood of Awesome

Enter Shikari is one of those bands that I wish I had discovered a decade ago. They’re a quartet of Brits that like to make music that sounds like post hardcore, techno, and protest tunes were thrown into a blender and never stopped spinning. Go listen to A Flash Flood of Colour, they put the entire album (with remixes and live tracks) on YouTube themselves. If you really like it you can even buy it. Who says I can’t write about something other than video games; today we find out what others may be fighting for.

Countries are just lines drawn in the sand drawn with a stick. I like this lyric, it makes sense. A multitude of problems in the world today affect us all and won’t be resolved until we work together to figure it all out. Too bad everyone still has their own interests placed above everyone else. I’m also happy to report that this record is not all doom and gloom, there is plenty of less dense subject matter that you can nod your head to or do menial tasks to. I like to listen to really loud, angry music while washing dishes.

System…Meltdown is the first two tracks on the album. I like it. It’s a good pump up track with the line from above; building on itself with an extended intro and coming in pummel the world’s problems into submission. Hello Tyrannosaurus, Meet Tyrannocide. That’s a song title, anyone who has an excuse to yell out a phrase like that is alright in my book. The real icing on the cake are the catchy guitar riffs Rory C. lays down. They’re not supposed to invoke your 80’s speed metal memories; Warm Smiles Will Not Make You Welcome Here has a riff that gets stuck in my head for days.

After listening to Take to the Skies and The Mindsweep I really wish I had gotten into Enter Shikari and listened to all of their material as it came out. There is a ton of growth that has happened over the last decade and they've even kept the same line up the entire time. It’s unfortunate that acts like Lost Prophets and Bullet for My Valentine had much more mainstream success than Enter Shikari, but then again a hype machine could have affected how their albums were written. Go listen to A Flash Flood of Colour, anything can happen in the next three and a half hours…

Meatloaf and Mac N Cheese With Side of Sphere Grid

Sometimes you want to go where you’ve been before. Whether that’s an old school, work place, or song is completely up to you. Where you want to be may also be somewhere you don’t really expect; the smells that hit you when someone is cooking a dish you hadn’t had in years. Today we aren’t fighting anything. We’re curling up in a nice warm blanket made of spheres and forced, horrible laughing. Take it easy.

Final Fantasy X hit Playstation 2 in 2001 and quickly drew in a huge audience. Of course I had been into the series since the 16-bit era because I’m cool like that. These gorgeous graphics, easy to use battle system, and fully voiced characters there was a whole new layer to Final Fantasy we hadn’t seen before. I’m not here to talk about that. This game is pure “put your brain on hold and let’s go” from start to finish and it’s on the Vita. Pick it up and go. Suspend the game when you need to. Plug in headphones to save others from the Tidus laugh and Rikku –isms. Every One Wins!

Now imagine sitting on a couch under a warm blanket racking up sphere levels and plugging them into the Sphere Grid for hours. Trans-Atlantic flight? What else are you going to do after watching two movies, sleeping for hours and still having a few hours left until you hit your destination? The game is relatively easy and has plenty of grind based trophies and that’s not a bad thing. Have I gotten all of the celestial weapons? I didn’t spend all the time required to do that a decade and a half ago when it first dropped. Let it go and do whatever you want to accomplish in the game. Mac N Cheese keeps really well and still tastes great when you come back to it.

Other games scratch this itch as well. Any kind of tactical, scenario based game is wonderful to come back to. X-COM, Civilization, and Master of Orion (not 3…) are games that I install on every computer I own and load up for an hour fix. I wasn’t expecting to find Final Fantasy X the kind of comfort food that it turned out to be, and I think I’m enjoying it more than the first time I played it.

Great. I’ll be back in an hour or so after a couple of missions in X-COM. 

A Little Late to the Line Party

War is a horrible thing. Downright disgusting. Not everyone has been there, and most aren't there by choice. I'm one of the idiots who went and took care of the combatants with the military in a couple operations in the Middle East. I have never seen such a sobering or honest take on how carnage can wear down a person. Today we fight like we're supposed to and deal with the consequences.

The picture above is what you should feel like after completing Spec Ops: The Line. Tired. Lost. Not aware of where you belong, if anywhere. Once in a while a piece of media arrives that conveys what it would be like to be someone else. Everyone remembers the Omaha Beach Invasion scene from Saving Private Ryan or a look into the mind of a medicated (or not) psychopath in The Voices; Ryan Reynolds put up a pretty decent performance in that movie but don't go too far out of your way to see it. I've seen Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and this is the most amazing representation of it in a video game.

The Line plays like any other third-person cover-based shooter. Duck behind a chest high wall and use your portable explosion mechanism to fling hot metal into your enemies' faces. A few licensed songs are woven in via the makeshift PA system strung throughout the desolated city to highlight some stretches of the game to great effect. The game play is  not the reason why we're here, the real spectacle is watching our Delta Force Captain slowly break down as he loses his sanity even as his subordinates start to question his actions.

You've heard the stirs this game made when it was released in 2012 with the white phosphorus and controversial depiction of Dubai being reclaimed by the desert. The latter image seems absolutely believable after venturing into that part of the world, those deserts are ruthless. I knew all of this going in, so I wasn't shocked by the civilian casualties or the "difficult" decisions I was forced to make on my squad's behalf. I was not aware that you would be fighting American Army throughout most of the game, yeah they're presented as defectors and traitors but I'm still uneasy about shooting my countrymen. After taking care of our soldiers for so many years it made me sick to my stomach to shoot and execute them; I've never had to tell myself "It's only a game" before.

Captain Walker is our case study. An All-American Delta Force hero, just like a million other military shooter protagonists before him. For the first half you can almost justify putting the game down because you've seen it all before. Don't make this mistake. If you played through Metal Gear Solid 2 the game went full on crazy after Raiden went under Big Shell for the last part of the game, The Line doesn't jump the shark quite as bad as the former's codec conversations but is the closest thing that reminds me of the tonal shift that takes place for Capt. Walker.

This isn't an experience you pat yourself on the back for after you complete it. You think about it and you think about it. It eats at the back of your mind. Not in a bad way, but an "I look at the world a little bit differently" sort of way. Spec Ops: The Line got its share of publicity when it came out and should be mandatory playing for anyone studying how to forge a narrative or just want to see what it's like to be a soldier in a less glamorized light a la Platoon.

Play this game.

The Ironic Position of Gamers

Social stereotypes are a horrible thing. What happens when they are applied to our part of society. If you are a gamer, you probably see us as a progressive type group always looking forward to better the world. If you are not, you may see gamers as fat, basement dwellers who have poor hygiene and send rape and death threats to figures that oppose their own opinions on what gaming should be. Wait. Hold on a minute. People actually did that?

Let's look at some of the bad, it's so bad that Law & Order: Special Victims Unit made an episode based on the events surrounding Anita Sarkeesian. They took it much further than what actually happened, but it wouldn't be a regular SVU episode if someone wasn't raped and humiliated. Seriously, why do people flock to this show? All is does is destroy faith in humanity. Sarkeesian is a very outspoken women's rights activist that has tried to call out the games industry for its virtual crimes against a specific gender. Just as with any group of people, the loudest contingent gets the most press and sent the above rape and death threats to Anita along with Google Earth images of her residence. This is seriously screwed up and uncalled for. Remember, there's an astronomical amount of hate slung toward Islam from the acts of a fringe group. It's not hard to imagine the idiot kids who insult your mother issuing these threats.

But what's that you say? For decades games have allowed players to solve events in diplomatic ways and some even allow you to go through them without killing anyone. I agree, there isn't anything much more satisfying than talking a computer out of wiping out humanity in the original Fallout. Hopefully by making these options viable and well known, the view on gaming could be less grim than all of the murder, death, kill, The X-Files painted almost two decades ago in its video game episode.

Sorry guys, we've got our heads so far up our own asses to realize that we are a minority. Sure gaming is a multi-billion dollar a year industry and has been getting more and more visible by the regular media, but it's still collectively seen as a hobby and not the "meaning of life" activity that seems to be popular among forum die hards. The reality is that someone can make a living creating, criticizing, and promoting video games. Someday there will be integration of the masses; hey, gay marriage is now legal in all 50 states! I dread the day where gamers' rights have to become a successful movement.

That's enough pointless meandering. The bottom line is that every person is a representative of whatever group they identify with. Ambassador may be a bit too strong of a word for every person of a group, but it is true. Don't do stupid things. Really. Respect others and remember all of the important lessons you learned in kindergarten.

Sometimes It Has Character

People make deep connections with strong characters all the time. Get your head out of the gutter and keep safe search on for this one, we're not here to corrupt the world any more than the internet already has. Whether someone wants to grow up and walk on the moon like Lance Armstrong or wants to remain cool and collected in a crisis like their mother, character inspiration comes in a myriad of forms. Naturally video games being such a huge medium for kids these days the next generations are going to be partially shaped by interactions with imaginary characters. Like we needed another excuse for children to not be exposed to Trevor from Grand Theft Auto 5.

Being a grown up who has played games all of his life I have probably been somewhat shaped by the characters I interacted with. I'm a sarcastic, arrogant jerk face. I gravitated to the loud mouthed, wise cracking, assholes. Here is my namesake, his name is Rune from Phantasy Star IV and immediately ridicules the main character for being too short to be a hero (and breaks the fourth wall by saying you're not strong enough to face a certain boss). Good thing he's best wizard in existence.

After thinking about it for a while, I realized that main heroes tend to be the most boring of characters. I realize that they are supposed to be your window into the game world and it's been common practice to make them just as much of a bystander as the player. Seriously, all of those silent jRPG protagonists should have been able to equip a bag of popcorn for when they aren't saying "...". It seems impossible to avoid generic tropes when characterizing video game characters as you could drag and drop characters from one game to another and have little affect on the overall experience.

It is pretty easy to write a single note character and just as easy to piece them together on traditional sides of a narrative. This makes it refreshing when you have an original character trope in any sort of media kind of like rooting for the serial killer in Dexter or loving the whore mongering, alcoholic, bureaucrat who happens to be a dwarf in Tyrion Lannister. The real tragedy lies in the fact that once an interesting type comes along they tend to be run into the ground over the next decade.

How many silent protagonists, brooding bad asses, innocent virgins, old sages, childhood companions, sultry seductresses, overprotective mothers, old perverts, lovable lunkheads, fallen idols, dumb brutes, amnesiacs, and evil rich people have you been exposed to? Think really hard about the characters that shaped you, not just things in the real world. Who are you?

RocketPun. A Dragon Quest Romp.

Video game enemies lead storied lives. Coming out the darkness only get swatted down by would be heroes and making sure to pick up milk on the way home. Once in a blue moon a lowly creature is selected to go on their own quest. A Dragon Quest. We will now fight the urge to make pun related Dad Jokes.

Some time around the start of this wildly popular blog I wrote about Dragon Warrior and Dragon Warrior II. Going against popular speculation we're covering Rocket Slime instead of Dragon Warrior III. All in due time.

This guy gets his own game! That's right chocobos, move over. Rocket Slime teaches us so much about the slime race. Who knew that slimes could stretch three times there length and snap like rubber bands to send foes flying and can glide by flattening themselves during a jump. The traditional Dragon Quest games would have been over really quick if they fought to their full potential. Slimes are also nature's pack horses, for when you don't have a horse, I guess; they can hold 3 slime units of weight at a time. A slime unit is the typical amount of weight of something. Yup. Don't read too much into it.



During the 10 hour action game Rocket (the slime) has to rescue the other inhabitants of Slimeria who were kidnapped during a raid by the platypus mafia when they attacked with their giant tank. If you remember Saturday morning cartoons, this conveys that feeling very well. Makes me want to grab a bowl of cereal watch acid influenced cartoons for hours; then again, we have Adult Swim for that now. Sit back and enjoy the ride.

The core of the game revolves around slamming yourself into items and enemies to stack them on your head so you can throw them onto railways to deliver them to the home town. Some light platforming and puzzle solving come up and are  hardly ever difficult. Boss fights are handled in tank battles. Tank battles. You have a pair of cannons on your tank that use the random items you have accumulated from around the game world (each with different attributes) and fire in two different arcs while your opponent does the same. Even your allies can have different effects when fired from a cannon. If that's not enough, it's possible to break (or fire yourself from a cannon) into the enemy tank and steal their ammo and hopefully destroy the core that's accessible when a tank's health reaches zero.

Rocket Slime is an absolute treasure. It's no where near serious and can serve as a palette cleanser between serious or dense games. Value can't be overlooked here either, you can grab this DS cart for under $10. As long as there's not a Steam Sale going on you can't expect better value than that! Buy the first North American Dragon Quest to not use the Dragon Warrior moniker.

Puns. The entire game is based on puns. From the Schleiman and Purrsecuter tanks to the Kingdom of Slimeria there is no shortage of delicious word play. Let me leave you with this.

Chrono Twigger

How could you not?

Ethan Carter....or How I Wanted to Test My New Graphics Card

The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is a very atmospheric game that looks incredible! There. I just saved you reading the rest of the post.

Walking through an abandoned train tunnel, generic worldly paranormal investigator #337 enters a valley that has seen better days. His biggest fan wrote letters to him that got more and more disturbing that finally warranted investigation. Paul Prospero fights for missing children everywhere, or at least in this valley he can't leave.

The Astronauts have created a total feast for the eyes. These environments are some of the best ever in a mid-tier/indie release. The amount of work put in into the rendering of the rocks, trees, water, buildings, and murder scenes deserve all the praise in the world. It feels like you are searching through an actual place called Red Creek Valley that may have been an important mill/mine/railway stop 50 years ago. Because the environment is the most fleshed out "character" in the game the actual character models leave a little bit to be desired. They look like game character models in an almost photo realistic setting. The experience may only last a few hours but you could spend just as much time treating the game like a virtual nature walk. Oculus, we're looking at you.

Gameplay is handled pretty well in Ethan Carter. You are a detective piecing together how an incident (likely murder) took place. Different snippets of the event play out in front of you like the image above and you must put them in the correct order to find out what happened. A few other points in the game you have to search an area for traps, drive a motorized mine cart, and avoid a ghost in an underground maze. Control is handled just like a first person shooter sans the shooting so anyone who has played a popular game in the last decade should be able to pick it up and play. The only gripe I have is when you have to duck under something 75% into the game and it's the first time you have to do so. Then again, crouching in a first person perspective game should probably be second nature by now.

The story of Ethan Carter is just as much part of the environment as anything else. It's always nice to see a story on the small scale. The story isn't small per say, just not affecting the entire world. It doesn't always have to be the entire universe in the balance with the chosen one reluctantly stepping up to save it. Restraint can be so much more powerful than going all out. 

In an age where there is an outcry against games that aren't games this is a good argument that this stance is something that no one will care about or remember in the next few years. 

What Is Destined to Fill the Void

I tried to jump on the Destiny bandwagon last September and stated that I liked the game. I did like the game but thought it felt empty in the narrative department. After a couple of months of the game's release I finally put my finger on what was bothering me; the narrative was too thin and I was craving a much more chaotic experience.

Where should you go if you want a fulfilling Sci Fi story? Star Control 2. Or if you recently picked up the Mass Effect Trilogy for a good deal and decide to replay the series. Some have claimed that the original hasn't aged well and it hasn't because Mass Effect 2 outdid it in almost every aspect.

 

Every aspect except the Mako Tank above. I love this tank. It rolls over everything. Some of the best parts of this game were blindly exploring planets trying to gauge whether or not you can scale a cliff face. I must be the video game version of a red neck, while I'm searching for Saren I stop on an abandoned planet and go muddin.

Serious Sam: The First Encounter is a masterpiece. Well, a budget game when it was released that still manages to be notable almost 15 years later. The entire game is frantically paced and self aware. The secrets left all over the levels are much more involved than "hidden item closets" by giving stupid/humorous messages, messing with gravity, and may have elaborate optional encounters that are on par with the main game. Skip the HD remake, it didn't add much to the experience.

Play what you like. Like what you play. If you feel something is missing in an experience seek out what you crave. As long as it's legal and doesn't make you look like too much of a dirtbag. 

Duscae.

The Final Fantasy XV demo is finally available and I can't be sure it's going to be any good. Somehow I have avoided any sort of press about the game aside from it starting off as Final Fantasy Versus XIII and being bumped up to main series status. Granted I haven't completed it, the experience feels like what it started out as: a side game. I like my action oriented RPG's that try to do something new but I really enjoy a new "Final Fantasy" experience every few years. XIII (and its trilogy) was a flawed experiment that probably put a lot of people on the fence for day one purchases of any new titles.

First off,  while the graphics are good the character designs are horrible. I don't know why everyone is wearing black on black, even I wore a bit of color in high school. These aren't uniforms either, it seems they choose to be seen this way. One of the major things XIII had going for it was character diversity at a glance; XV gave the "smart" guy glasses and a British accent and the buff dude tattoos with a gruff biker voice to match. There's probably more story to what's going on but the first impressions are pretty unlikable.

For an action RPG this game seems slow. Maybe it's because Dragon Age: Inquisition has been spending a lot of time in my PS4 but this almost feels like a low rent version of that game play wise. You have a party that you control the main character of and hope everyone else does their tasks as effectively as possible. Noctis (or Highness) manifests different types of weapons based on what part of an assault you are on. Using a short sword to open with a fast attack, then switching to a zwei-hander for an ongoing assault, and ending with a spear thrust for a killing blow is pretty cool, although you just hold square to make all of this happen there is an element of strategy where you might need to make the short sword the ongoing assault for a smaller, faster enemy. To aid in the sluggishness of the battles you can throw your sword and teleport to it to enter or leave combat fairly quickly. You defend by holding a button to sort of "auto-dodge" but it's not infinite as most actions take MP. Lastly the triangle button is mapped to different abilities that you switch with the D-pad, these may be thrusts, drains, or dragoon jumps depending on what weapons you have equipped.

The camera is terrible. It should at least stay focused on what you are locked on to.

XV feels like an off shoot Final Fantasy game and probably would have fared better as just another part of Fabula Nova Crystallis series thing that went way over scope. I don't know how much different/better/bigger the main game will be, but I think I'll wait for the reviews and opinions of my friends to come in before I pull the trigger here.

I guess the best recent "FF" experience was Bravely Default. A next gen game with that feel would be incredible.